


Syrup of Platitudes, Twice Distilled

by feroxargentea, Luzula (Luzula_podfic)



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Common Cold, Community: pt-lightning, Friendship, Gen, PT-Lightning Challenge: Round 2, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:01:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1153973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula_podfic/pseuds/Luzula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Which is more important in the great scheme of things: the naval frigate <i>Surprise</i> with a chase in sight, or a dish of mouldering worms? An everyday dilemma in the lives of Aubrey and Maturin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Syrup of Platitudes, Twice Distilled

This is a podfic collaboration for the second lightning round of pod-together, written by Feroxargentea and recorded by Luzula.  
Length: 12:32 minutes.  
The recorded sounds of sailing ships and the sea are [these](http://freesound.org/people/Supertyv2/sounds/166753/) [two](http://freesound.org/people/rockdoctor/sounds/38017/) from freesound.org.

[Click through](https://app.box.com/s/ab4ykddolz9kbpjrbmpg) (or open in a new tab) for streaming or download.

Alternative download link [here](http://podfic.jinjurly.com/audfiles/352014020209.zip).

***

 

Jack Aubrey pushed open the door of his sleeping-cabin, which had been given over to Stephen Maturin for the last week as he recuperated from a cold. Approaching the cot, Jack took up the bulky glass bottle Sophie had put up for him: an invaluable concoction, she had used it for all the children’s sniffles, and she swore nothing else could have brought George through the whooping cough. It would do Stephen the world of good, could Jack but get him to swallow a dose.

“Will you not try just a taste of this syrup, now, Stephen?” he asked, brandishing the spoon.

Stephen waved it away waspishly. “None of your patent hogwash,” he said, “and you may tell Killick to take away this dish of odious treacled pap, too. A slight indisposition, the merest rhinorrhoea, does not reduce a person to infancy, for all love.”

“Not just a spoonful or two, to brace you up?” said Jack. “My old nurse always said you should ‘starve a cold and feed a fever’. Or possibly it was ‘feed a cold and starve a fever’, I do not quite recall.”

“A valuable prescription indeed,” said Stephen. “One wonders how physicians and apothecaries find any employ at all, when such excellent advice may be freely obtained. Here is a puzzle for you, Jack: my cold is also feverish. Have you a nostrum for that, pray tell?”

Jack put the bottle back in the rack. “I see you are still a little tired, brother. You should try to get some rest. I shall have the hands put to quiet work, as soon they are done filling the shot-garlands.”

Stephen propped himself on one elbow and blew his nose into a filthy kerchief. “So that is what that fearful rumbling was. I thought the ship must be assailed by cetaceans, sure, and your crew fending them off with capstan bars. Is there a purpose to their efforts, now, or do you merely make work for them, to ‘brace them up’ as you mean to brace me? You need not shake your head at me, joy; a good half-part of your crew’s labours is entirely vain and purposeless. Scrubbing decks to whiteness, such wanton piffle! Fie on you and all tyrannous masters.”

“Needs must, you know, when the Devil has idle hands,” said Jack.

“Indubitably,” said Stephen, smacking at his pillow and lying back down. “Else he might take the hindmost with a long spoon.”

“Quite. That would never do,” said Jack, pulling up Stephen’s coverlet and then backing out of the cabin. He always humoured Stephen’s little confusions; one could not expect a foreigner to have a perfect grasp of English idiom, and that crack about spoons was no doubt some Greek tag or other. It was a fine thing for a ship’s company to have a physician who could fling about Greek and Latin as freely as pennies on payday, but common sense, Jack knew, was apt to be lost in translation.

There was, in fact, a purpose to the Surprises’ labours that day: an unknown vessel had been spotted on the horizon, three points off the larboard bow. Conceivably she was an Indiaman, but something in her shyness, her way of lurking hull-down to windward, suggested an enemy frigate, and the French 42-gun _Poignard_  was known to be thereabouts in the Indian Ocean, harassing the merchant fleet. Whatever she was, Jack meant to tack and cross her wake in the night and come up to her tomorrow, if she did not give him the slip in the darkness. Not that he would tell Stephen any of this yet; excitement was known to be injurious to the sick. He pulled the cabin door closed behind him and stamped off towards the main-hatch.

 

***

 

It was several hours past dawn next day by the time Jack came back to the sleeping-cabin to see how his friend did. Stephen was sat up in his cot, reading a salt-stained volume by the light of the scuttle and sneezing at intervals. He looked frowzy and disreputable but a good deal brighter, and an egg-stained plate on the locker testified to his appetite’s improvement.

Jack pushed the plate aside and perched on the locker.

“Have you heard about the chase, Stephen?” he asked. “You was not to be told, but Killick will have let it slip when he brought your breakfast, hey? I thought as much. Hull-up, and we are closing her, though she tacks to keep the weather-gage. I have young Richardson at work on the figures; he calculates we might catch her an hour before nightfall, if this breeze was to hold steady. A gratifying grasp of mathematics, he has, for his age. Pray remind me, Stephen, next time we are in England, that I should introduce him to Miss Herschel one of these days.”

“Miss Herschel?”

“Miss Caroline Herschel,” said Jack. “She that is sister to William.”

Stephen merely looked stupid.

“Oh, you do remember, Stephen. Telescope Herschel, who invited us both up to Slough to see his new instrument, although the twins had the croup and we could not go. But his sister has been down to Ashgrove more than once. Perhaps it was always whilst you was away on your travels, however.”

“I believe I do recall Sophie mentioning a Miss Telescope Herschel,” said Stephen, “and not in the kindest of terms.”

“No. No, well, Sophie did not greatly care for her, it is true.”

Sophie’s words had been rather more scathing, Jack recalled. It had not suited her in the least to have anyone shut up with her husband in the little observatory at Ashgrove, even though Miss Herschel must have been sixty if a day, not to mention knee-high to Jack himself. It was a mystery what the Hanoverians could possibly feed their children on; stunted as a marooned midshipman, she was, the poor lady, and yet with a voice like a lark. 

“She was a singer before she was an astronomer, Stephen, did you know?” he said. “To think of her perched up on the great 40-foot machine in Slough – there’s pluck for you! Chirping to keep herself warm, like a Jenny-wren in a great oak. I told her as much.”

Stephen’s attempt at a laugh turned into a hacking cough. “That was not very gallant of you, Jack.”

“Oh, we do not stand on ceremony,” said Jack. “I sang her a catch or two up in the observatory whilst we waited for Venus to set, and she called me a bittern in a band-box.”

“Ha! The singular trysts of mathematicians,” said Stephen. “I might write a paper on such mating calls; it would stun the Royal Society. I fear I must be more nightjar than nightingale myself, with this wretched coryza.”

“Not at all, my dear fellow,” said Jack. Indeed, there was little damage a head-cold could do to Stephen’s froglike croak; it was the only truly amphibious part of him, Jack thought, with an inward smile and an inward pang that such a fine clench was unrepeatable. “Well,” he said, “it is all one. I shall leave you to your papers, and I shall send Tom down to you when we have any news of the chase.”

 

***

 

By early afternoon the chase was a mere four miles off, and in the sleeping cabin Stephen had so far recovered his spirits as to call for his dissecting kit. Jack’s Greek fo’c’slemen, the brothers Sponge, had the week before brought up from the reefs near some desolate waterless island a haul of bivalve molluscs of peculiar interest, creatures that during Stephen’s illness had reached such a state of putrefaction that Jack had had to have Killick remove them to the sickbay.

“Tell me, Jack,” Stephen said, “tell me now, is the ship likely to _hove to_  in the forthcoming day or so, at all? I have my worms to think of.”

“Worms?” Jack asked. “Oh, your shelled beasts. Forgive me, Stephen, I had thought them some sort of clam.”

“So they are, joy, so they are, and quite an ordinary assortment at that; I must confess I was disappointed in them at the start, having expected a more peculiar fauna from such an isolated islet. I had failed to consider that it was not so isolated by sea, however, and the larval stages of such creatures can no doubt drift with the currents for many leagues, for Bonden tells me these currents—these fluxions and circumvolutions—are considerable, though undetectable to the ordinary mariner. Unless he was mistaken?”

“I believe it is generally accepted that there are currents, brother,” said Jack patiently. He had long ago learned not to wonder at the extent of his erudite friend’s ignorance.

“I rejoice to hear it,” said Stephen. “The very ordinariness of the mollusca is fascinating, therefore; but the great point was what lay within them: three entirely new species—and, if I do not err, at least one entirely new genus—of parasitic trematode! There now, Jack! I had not finished dissecting them, however, before that officious meddler Killick carried them off with some quibbling complaint about the smell.”

“They was not the very freshest, Stephen. Perhaps you could not appreciate the stench, what with your nose so blocked up.” Jack picked up the stack of untouched handkerchiefs from the locker and dandled them thoughtfully.

“Blocked up, fiddlesticks. I can smell perfectly well,” said Stephen. “And you may put those cloths away; this one is barely blotted; it will serve a while longer. But I will tell you what troubles me, Jack: the present slope, the _declivity_ of the deck is quite unreasonable. It would be convenient if the ship could finish her business, so that I can work on my helminths on an _even keel_ , if you understand me.”

“Hove to, with a chase in sight? What a fellow you are, Stephen. If she is the _Poignard_ , or anything else under 72 guns, we shall bring her to action before evening, weather-gage or no weather-gage.”

Stephen sniffed. “See those loose song-sheets in the corner, vacillating between floor and wall? They can no longer tell which might be the horizontal. Must I then dissect at such an uncivilised angle?”

Jack stooped to collect the unfurling papers from the deck. For a moment, he tried to imagine a world in which a worm could be weighed in importance against an enemy frigate. With a larger stock of Latin tags, one might have achieved it, perhaps, but—“I am afraid it really would not do,” he said. “We have not a moment to lose; we must be early birds, Stephen, early birds.”

“I see,” said Stephen. “And my poor fluke-worms must sit yet longer in their spirits of wine, uncaught.”

“The needs of the Service must come first, as you may have heard before,” said Jack.

“Not above a thousand times, I do assure you.”

Jack smiled at him. “I am sorry it must be so, my dear philosopher. We should be on an even-enough keel tomorrow, though, if indeed we still float at all. Then you may have as many horizontal worms as you wish, and we might have a song or two in the evening, if your poor throat will bear it.”

“My cello can sing, if I cannot,” said Stephen. “Very well, my dear; I shall admit defeat and wish you good fortune in your chase. It is all well. For, as the poet tells us, the worm cannot be mightier than the sword.”

**Author's Note:**

> Luzula: Ferox, thanks for writing this for me! I'm glad we could get it finished despite both of us being quite busy this month. I love the story; it's such a delightful little sketch of Jack and Stephen. Also, it was a lot of fun to do Stephen's scratchy and congested voice. *g* One of the prompts I gave Ferox was Jack fangirling [Caroline Herschel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel) (which he actually does in canon, too), and this did make it into the story. : )
> 
> Ferox: I love Luzula's Master and Commander podfics, and when she suggested writing one to include Caroline Herschel, I could not say no :-) The lady's [memoirs](http://archive.org/stream/memoircorrespond00hers#page/n7/mode/2up) are online and well worth a read.


End file.
